Erdogan: “Get Over the Fall of Constantinople”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told the world, in effect, to move on from the fall of Constantinople, dismissing the 573-year-old wound as something history's losers need to simply accept and forget.
The statement is a direct provocation aimed at Greece, Cyprus, and the broader Orthodox Christian world, for whom the fall of Constantinople in 1453 remains one of the most defining catastrophes in their collective memory. The city, known to Greeks as Konstantinoupoli, served as the capital of the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years before Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II stormed its walls on May 29, 1453.
"Get over it," Erdogan told the world's critics of the Ottoman conquest — 573 years after Constantinople fell.
Erdogan's comment comes just one day after Turkey marked the annual celebrations of the conquest, which Ankara frames as a proud national triumph. The Turkish government holds large-scale commemorations each year on May 29, with Erdogan typically using the occasion to assert Ottoman legacy and Turkish regional power. This year, he went further, telling critics of that legacy to get over it.
For Greeks worldwide, Constantinople carries enormous weight, not only as a lost capital but as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which remains in Istanbul to this day under significant legal and institutional restrictions imposed by the Turkish state. The Hagia Sophia, reconverted into a mosque by Erdogan in 2020, stands as the most visible symbol of that unresolved tension.
The remark is unlikely to go unanswered in Athens or Nicosia, where political leaders have consistently pushed back against Erdogan's revisionist framing of Byzantine and Greek history in the region.
